


Tea for Two

by sanguinity



Series: sang's moreholmes [17]
Category: Moriarty - Anthony Horowitz, Sherlock Holmes Series - Anthony Horowitz
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Gen, Moriarty being Moriarty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-04-06 05:25:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19056097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: Professor Moriarty and Athelney Jones had nearly a year's idyll together, but matters have come to a reckoning at last.It is a pity.





	Tea for Two

**Author's Note:**

> For [thedoubtfulguest](https://thedoubtfulguest.dreamwidth.org/).
> 
> Severe spoilers for Anthony Horowitz's _Moriarty._
> 
> Thanks to PhoenixFalls and grrlpup for beta, and dancesontrains for Britpick!

We had nearly a year's idyll together, Athelney Jones and I. Nearly a year of intelligent conversation over tea, of languid evenings by the fire, of cosy family dinners in Camberwell. It was not nearly so long as I had spent with Robert Pilgrim at the beginning of my career, before his wife entreated him to part ways with me, but I had not expected even so much as a year: Jones, unlike Pilgrim, fancied himself a creature of the law. It was naturally a hindrance to our partnership.

For nearly a year, Jones had worried at the unsolved murders of Clarence Devereux, his lieutenants, and their servants and henchmen. For nearly a year I had asked witless questions and subtly pushed the investigation in misleading directions. For nearly a year, Jones had chased his tail and trusted me. But it seemed matters had come to a reckoning at last.

It was a pity. 

At least there were no policemen, plainclothes or otherwise, on Chiltern Street; they would have been a messy inconvenience. My own people were in their usual places, and I stopped to buy a newspaper from one. A few words with him reassured me that all was as it should be. My eye was caught by the new issue of the _Strand_ among his wares, prominently advertising a new Sherlock Holmes story, "The Beryl Coronet." Not one of mine, of course — Holmes and I had rarely crossed paths — but I still felt strangely wistful: it was unlikely that Jones had had a chance to read it yet. There was every chance that he never would.

On a whim, I put down a second coin for the magazine.

The curtains of my first-floor sitting room were drawn, light peeking out from behind them in the dusk, and I wondered if Jones had worked out that I had a sniper in my employ. I did not look behind me at the window where Moran lurked.

Mrs Spencer, that stout woman, met me at the door. "I sent word straightaway, Mr Chase," she said quietly. 

She knew my real name and title, but she never spoke either within these walls. A gifted manager and a tolerable cook, she had once been the domestic employee of a Mrs Inskip who had handled certain affairs for me during the first instance of my criminal enterprise. Unfortunately, Mrs Inskip had also been one of the first to turn to Devereux when he began to take over my organisation, and after Devereux's untimely and regrettable death under Smithfield Market, I had taken the boy Perry to visit the two women: Perry got a treat and Mrs Spencer received a field promotion. She took the transfer to my household with pragmatic equanimity, demonstrating all the discretion, capability, and loyalty that I required from my staff, and often passed me messages under Jones' very nose. It was of course her message that had recalled me from my office this evening.

"How much does he know?" I asked her, handing her my hat and gloves.

"Hard to say, sir. I caught him in your bedroom, turning it inside out."

"And I thought him a gentleman." Once a policeman, always a policeman, it seemed. There was nothing to find here at Chiltern Street — confidential correspondence was conducted from my alleged club in Paddington Street — and yet I was still sorely disappointed by Jones' lapse in manners.

"He bade me go to my sister's tonight. Said it wasn't safe for me to stay here," Mrs Spencer continued.

"That's well of him. Send up a pot of tea in a few minutes. And perhaps you should stay clear of the windows." 

"Yes, sir," she said, as unflinching as she had been the day Mrs Inskip died.

"Good woman." 

I hung my coat and climbed the twelve steps to the sitting room.

The sitting room was less mine than ours. I was the only one who lived here, as Jones returned to his family's bosom every night, but he used my first story as freely if it we were two bachelors sharing digs. Jones consulted with clients here, but he also took his ease between cases, treating Chiltern Street as his own private club of two: many an hour we had spent in our armchairs before the fire, warming our bones and sharing a pot of tea, snug against the sleeting rain. I had been "his dear Chase," and he had taken as much pleasure in my company as I had in his.

But those cosy days were gone: I pushed open the door to find him in my own armchair, not his — of the two, his chair was closer to the windows — and he had dragged my chair still farther from the windows, well into the depths of the room, and moreover turned it so that it commanded a view of the door. He sat there waiting for me, grave and determined, with his raven-headed cane across his knees. That particular cane had a single-shot pistol concealed in its handle; he sometimes carried it if he expected an especially deadly fracas with an adversary. Today, it was aimed at me. I confess, in that moment I might have loved him a little. 

I let the false, American smile fall from my face, and instead showed him something of my true affection and regret. 

I placed newspaper and magazine on the tea table. "My dear Jones. Rearranging the furniture?" 

Surprise and dismay passed over his face, and I saw then that whatever he had deduced, he had not truly believed it until that moment. Perhaps if I had bluffed it out, feigned surprise and fed him another pleasingly-crafted set of lies, I could have eked out another few weeks with him. But doing so would not have gained me much: once he started to doubt me, no lies would make him sure of me again.

"Stay away from the windows," he warned, although I had made no move in that direction. "Who are you really?" 

I ignored the question and brought the second chair nearer to where he sat, but not so close so as to alarm him — or so I thought, but his hand tightened on his cane nevertheless. It grieved me to see. He had once tended my injuries with those hands. The night of the bloodbath under Smithfield Market, it had been Jones' own hand that had cleaned my wounds and applied ice to my swollen and battered face. It had been a rare moment of tenderness in my life, and it affected me profoundly. It was then that I had first conceived of my plan to preserve the friendship between us.

I settled deep into the chair, steepling my fingers. I tilted my head back and watched him through half-slitted eyes. "Do you not already know? Come, let us have one last deduction: tell me what you have discovered."

His expression flickered in disgust at the apparent facsimile of one of our little shared rituals; perhaps Jones did not know that Chase's pleasures had genuinely been my own.

"You mock me." 

"Not at all. Indeed, I have enjoyed your company this last year — a man in my position seldom has occasion for fellow feeling. Since it is about to be over, indulge me one last time. Tell me what you know."

"You're not Frederick Chase."

I shrugged. "If anyone is, I am." 

But he was not interested in questions of philosophy. "There is no Frederick Chase. Pinkerton's assures me they have employed no one of that name, neither in pursuit of Clarence Devereux nor otherwise. There is no Midnight Watch, nor ever has been. In fact, they seemed ignorant of Clarence Devereux altogether."

"Pinkerton's might not choose to confide their internal operations to a disgraced ex-inspector of Scotland Yard," I suggested.

His expression hardened, but he chose to ignore the taunt. "No part of Frederick Chase's alleged history can be verified: he was never the son of a Boston lawyer, let alone one who is a prominent member of the Republican Party and the Myopia Club. There is no record of Frederick Chase crossing the Atlantic, nor the Channel after that. In fact, to the best of my ability to discover, Frederick Chase never existed before I met him in Meiringen."

I didn't bother to deny it. Frederick Chase had been a hastily conceived identity, only meant to survive a few weeks' use: had it been more robust, I never would have needed to murder half the staff of Scotland Yard's telegraph room — and Jones' personal secretary beside — to protect it.

"And how did you come to perform these investigations?" I asked. "It's hardly the worthy act of a trusted friend and partner."

The explanation proved much as I expected. Moran and Perry's attack under Smithfield market had convinced Jones that there was a second party interested in Devereux's destruction. It was true enough, although I had intended only to capture Devereux: his death had been regrettable and entirely accidental. Had he lived, I might have been able to extract control of his American empire, an easier job than resurrecting my English empire from its war-torn remnants. Furthermore, in America it would not have mattered that Jones already knew my face and might someday learn my name — in America, this day of reckoning would never have arrived. It was a trivial reason to regret Devereux's death, but even so early in our acquaintance I had enjoyed having a friend again.

But once Jones had deduced the existence of some second criminal party, it had thereafter required only the painstaking work of tracing out which actions had been theirs and how each had come to be. It was too much of a coincidence that Scotchy Lavelle and his household had died within hours of our visit there; consequently, Jones had hypothesised that this second party was somehow coordinating their activity with our own. And that, however much he tried to avoid it, had ultimately thrown me under suspicion. Once Jones began to question my role, it ultimately led him to question everything about me, including my very existence. 

"And I am...?" I prompted.

He hesitated, and the gravity of my name — the ruthlessness reputed to it and the atrocities he knew me to have committed under it — loomed heavily in the silence. I saw his courage waver, and for a moment, I was disappointed in him. It was only human of him — and too, he had spent nearly a year as my dupe, which might shake any man's confidence — and yet he had shown more resolve when we hunted Devereux together. I resented that Devereux had been honoured with that part of him, and I was not.

But as I watched, he rallied. 

"Professor James Moriarty," he said, and my faith in him was reaffirmed. Perhaps if he had given me a different name, I would have let him go. 

Then again, perhaps not.

"Not one of Moriarty's lieutenants?" I asked.

He shook his head. "No. For a lieutenant to maintain this ruse for a year, that would be a sign of a dangerously divided loyalty. Moriarty would never have tolerated it. But to spend a year himself as Frederick Chase, amusing himself by day while re-establishing his criminal organisation by night — that could be a caprice of the man himself."

I nodded, curiously pleased with him, as if he had been one of my more gifted mathematics students of old. All told, Jones had done very well. There were minor inaccuracies in his account of events, but nothing of consequence; the greater surprise was in how long he had taken to reach his conclusions. But in this matter he was the kettle and I the pot: in my own trusting naivete, I had permitted an entire criminal enterprise to be stolen out from under me. 

And Devereux had never first convinced me that he was my friend.

"A neat piece of reasoning, barring the leap of faith at the end. I trust, for your sake, that you're not planning on taking this to the Yard. In fact, I wonder at your temerity in confronting me without hard evidence."

"There's a letter detailing everything. Should I disappear or be killed, it will be sent to the Yard."

"Inconvenient. Still, this persona would be no loss — it exists for no reason but our friendship — and letters can be intercepted. Now, normally you would entrust such a letter to me, your partner, but given that I am its subject… I assume it is in your lady wife's hands."

"And she is where you cannot reach her."

His bravado made me smile. "Is that so?"

The blood drained from Jones' face. "What have you done with her?"

I did not answer, for the tea arrived just then. I stood and brought the tea table nearer my chair — it was quite inconvenient, how Jones had jumbled us both into the room's corner like this — and Mrs Spencer set the tray down upon it. 

"I told you to go to your sister's," Jones said, and he sounded like a man hemmed in from all sides.

Mrs Spencer smiled, homey and comforting. "She's away to Ipswich for the fortnight, so I came home again. Anyways, it didn't feel right, leaving you and Mr Chase to face whatever it is on your own. I'll keep my head down and be right enough, Mr Jones, nought worry about me." 

It was a fine performance, but I saw that Jones was no longer so trusting as he once was.

"Thank you, Mrs Spencer, that will be all," I said in my own tones.

"Very good, Mr Chase," she replied, and left the room.

"She's one of yours," Jones said, when the door had shut behind her.

I did not answer. I poured tea for myself, then added milk and sugar. I normally take neither, but Jones took both, and I wanted to put him at his ease. About the tea, at least.

"Elspeth and Beatrice?" he asked, his voice unsteady with the force of his emotion.

"Perry — do you remember the boy Perry?" The question was pure theatrics: the sanguinary little demon was very memorable. "Perry is with them." 

I lied, of course. Perry was guarding our back door in case Jones should attempt an untimely exit, much as Moran was guarding the front; Mrs Jones and her daughter were perfectly safe wherever Jones had stashed them. Elspeth and Beatrice Jones were only civillians, after all, and I am too much of a gentleman to use a man's wife and child against him.

But a man's _fear_ for his wife and child... 

Jones' grip tightened on his pistol-cane. "If that monster has harmed Elspeth or Beatrice…"

"Careful," I warned. "My death, accidental or otherwise, would not bode well for your family."

With some effort, he gathered himself, and I felt a surge of affection for him, as one might for a particularly clever hound. I took a long draught from my teacup, drinking enough to satisfy even the most cautious observer that it was neither drugged nor poisoned. "Tea?" I offered. "Shall I pour, or would you be happier pouring your own?"

But Jones did not want tea. 

Not as yet, in any case. But then I had not laid out my proposal before him.

"Now, as to our options," I said, settling myself back into my seat again. "Ideally, we would continue as we are, although without the pretenses and subterfuges that have marked our friendship to date. You would join my organisation and continue your side-work as a consulting detective, doing whatever little jobs I request. You needn't worry they would be anything too distasteful: I use each man according to his strengths, and you are a clever hunting hound, but no pit-fighter. I have others for that work. All told, your hands would be only a little dirtier than they are now, and you could still return to the loving arms of your family each night."

"I will not work for you," Jones said, still fearful for his wife and child but staunch. 

His naivete made me smile. "You already have been, or did you not realise? I have been your patron this past year. Several of your cases were nothing more than a gift between friends, but consider, for example, the Pemberton palfrey or the Wakeford diamonds…? Ah, the light dawns. Yes, accomplice to murder twice over. Another reason to avoid taking my identity to Scotland Yard: you have spent a year working hand-in-hand with Professor Moriarty, and would be little better than a criminal informant to them. As dirty as your master, and tolerated only for the information you can provide."

Whatever the man's physical infirmities, they were not reflected in his courage. He was grim but resolute. "Better to make a clean breast of it and remedy whatever can be righted than to engage in further evil."

"And what of the cost to your family? To see husband and father disgraced so? No? As it pleases you, then. It is of no matter in any case: that is the ideal solution, but not practicable. As fond as I am of you, you have not earned my trust.

"A second option is for me to finish my tea and leave you to your fate. I predict you will be dead within hours, the unfortunate outcome of a case gone terribly wrong. I, your grieving partner, will solve your murder, which will both ingratiate me to Scotland Yard — where I will become better-placed to monitor and influence their activities — and provide me the opportunity to dispose of a persistent independent operator who has refused to bring himself under my protection. Your wife and daughter will unfortunately be left to make their own way in the world, but I imagine that in tribute to our past friendship," I raised my cup of tea to him in salute, "I will take an interest in their welfare."

"You fiend," Jones said, his hands tightening on his cane again. He had taken the prediction of his own death with equanimity — perhaps had even expected as much — but the thought of my insinuating myself into his family's home made him incandescent with rage.

"Careful," I warned him, concerned for how he was gripping his pistol-cane. "Remember Perry. He would happily murder your family for no reason at all; it is only caution of me that stays him." 

Jones composed himself at some cost, and again I felt a wild flare of affection for him. I waited, and when I thought he had himself under control again, I continued. 

"This is not an altogether poor solution — you will admit it has much to commend it — but I fear that I will miss your friendship."

"We were never friends."

"No? I remember it differently. You say Frederick Chase never existed, and yet we shared a fire and sitting room for nearly a year, you sharing your deductions and exploits, your dreams and ambitions, with as attentive a companion as I daresay you ever had. For me, this room has been a much-needed respite from the thankless work of re-establishing control over my empire. Suffice it to say that a man in my position seldom experiences true fellowship, and I have enjoyed having yours."

It was no more than the truth: I would regret killing him. I had endured much when Jones and I first met, struggling for months against the encroaching foe, engineering one last desperate sally against a vastly more numerous enemy. I had lost nearly every ally. I had mourned my only friend's only son. I had hurled myself from a waterfall; I had been coshed over the head; I had been frozen in a meat locker; I had been beaten with fists and batons. And after the debacle at Smithfield Market, what did I have to show for any of it, beyond Claude Devereux's bleeding corpse and the war-torn tatters of London's once great criminal enterprise? A criminal enterprise that no longer even recognised itself as mine? Moran and Perry had come out well from the preceding months, each amply paid in their own preferred coin, but I, I had lost much and gained little.

A friend in Athelney Jones, that was all. 

That night he had cleaned my wounds and treated me tenderly, and I asked myself, _Should only Moran and Perry gain something from this misadventure? Should there not be something for me?_

The next morning, when Jones again proposed a partnership in Chiltern Street, I chose to indulge him. 

Now, a year later and with London again mine, or nearly so, I found the question no less compelling: _Should there not be something for me?_

I returned my attention to my tea.

"What is it you want?" Jones finally asked, brimming with banked fear and frustration, when I let the silence drag on. "If you would not kill me, nor have me work for you?" 

I smiled inwardly.

"That you come away with me. Put yourself entirely in my hands. You will not have so much freedom as now, of course, but your family will be safe, and I will still have your companionship. And who knows what the future may hold?"

His face twisted in confusion, in disgust, in outright rebellion... Again, his hold tightened on his cane. Again, I saw him think of Perry. 

Meanwhile, I drank my tea, and did not let myself dwell on how much I would regret his death. Or, for that matter, my own. A rational man would have had Jones murdered sometime during the past year; a rational man would have received Mrs Spencer's note tonight and left Jones' fate to Perry and Moran. But after nearly a year of shared tea by the fireside, I was neither a rationalist nor even a realist: I was infected by something as imaginary as affection, and willing to risk all for it.

It seemed Jones was, too, in the end. It was affection for his wife and daughter that drove him, not affection for me, but that might come in time.

"You guarantee their safety?" he asked. He was a man in a trap, looking for a way out, but finding none.

Or none he would risk, which was no difference.

I put down my teacup. "Wholly. You shall write a note to your wife asking her to entrust her letters to me, and I swear that your wife and daughter shall live with my protection, but without my interference." 

"And how shall I trust you?"

I spread my hands. "You have the word of a gentleman."

Still he hesitated.

I took pity on him. "Perhaps it will serve better to think of what I can do — you remember Bladeston House? — and ask what alternatives you have."

I saw the moment the fight went out of him. I reached for his cane, and he let me have it. Not turning my back on him, for he was never so dangerous as he was in his despair, I retrieved pen and paper from the desk for him. He wrote his note, and I read it over. I passed him the candle and sealing wax, and he took the ring from his finger to seal it. When he finished, I took the ring from him, and tucked both it and the note away in my jacket.

While there, I retrieved a small paper of powder and placed it beside his neglected cup and saucer. 

"What is that?" he asked, his voice heavy with foreboding.

"For your tea," I told him, and said no more.

It was difficult for him to do, and I watched him wage his inner war all over again. But eventually he poured a defiant dab of milk in his cup — neither more nor less than his usual — filled it with tea, and added my powder along with his customary two lumps. It was a strange thing for him to do, to take his tea just as usual, but the familiarity of it filled me with warmth: although his hands trembled minutely, I knew at each step just what motion would come next, and thrilled to see it happen exactly as predicted. The hatred in his eyes as he stirred in my drug and his sugar only sweetened the feeling in my breast. 

I poured myself a fresh cup — this time preparing it with lemon, as I preferred — and we drank our tea together.

While we waited for the drug to take effect, I opened my copy of the _Strand_ and found the latest adventure of the man Jones so longed to emulate. Clearing my throat, I read to Jones of a madman coming along Baker Street through the February snow.

Jones fought the drug, the dear man, even after having administered it himself. He tried valiantly to keep his head upright, to keep his burning gaze fixed on me. I watched fondly as he was overcome, his head nodding and his focus drifting. However naive and trusting he had been, he was also a perceptive man, given to flashes of brilliance, and I would not have him alert for his journey to his new home.

Presently, I took the cup and saucer from his nerveless fingers. I put his tea things aside with the magazine, and standing, I let my hand rest on his shoulder. There would not be many moments of peace between us after this. Perhaps not for a very long while.

Crossing to the window, I pulled back the curtains and lowered the gas three times. Across the street in the dark, Moran saw. Then I touched the bell for Mrs Spencer, and returned Jones' side to wait for my associates.


End file.
